JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental stress and its consequent mental disorders (MDs) constitute a significant public health issue. With the advent of machine learning (ML), there's potential to harness computational techniques for better understanding and addressing mental stress and MDs. This comprehensive review seeks to elucidate the current ML methodologies employed in this domain to pave the way for enhanced detection, prediction, and analysis of mental stress and its subsequent mental disorders.

Objective:

This review aims to investigate the scope of Machine Learning (ML) methodologies employed in the detection, prediction, and analysis of mental stress and its consequent mental disorders (MDs).

Methods:

Utilizing a rigorous scoping review process with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extention for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines, this investigation delves into the latest ML algorithms, preprocessing techniques, and data types employed in the context of stress and stress-related MDs.

Results:

The findings highlight that Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Network (NN), and Random Forest (RF) models consistently exhibit superior accuracy and robustness among all machine learning algorithms examined. Physiological parameters such as heart rate measurements and skin response are prevalently used as stress predictors due to their rich explanatory information concerning stress and stress-related MDs, as well as the relative ease of data acquisition. The application of dimensionality reduction techniques, including mappings, feature selection, filtering, and noise reduction, is frequently observed as a crucial step preceding the training of ML algorithms.

Conclusions:

The synthesis of this review identifies significant research gaps and outlines future directions for the field. These encompass areas such as model interpretability, model personalization, the incorporation of naturalistic settings, and real-time processing capabilities for the detection and prediction of stress and stress-related MDs.